One problem with small publishers

Last month I saw a debut showcase of The Crown Conspiracy by Michael J. Sullivan on Fantasy Debut. It looked like a fun book, so when I made my last Amazon order I tossed that one in the cart too, along with Matters of the Blood by Maria Lima.

The Crown Conspiracy is published by Aspirations Media, which I've never even heard of. According to a post by the author on his Amazon blog (Amazon has blogs?), a sudden demand for the book has caught the publisher and its distributor off guard. In short, people are ordering the book all over the place but no one's getting copies and probably won't for at least several more weeks.

But Matters of the Blood isn't available either. It was published by Juno Books, which is one of the big small publishers (although technically now they're just a newly acquired imprint of a big publisher, as Pocket Books recently ate them). No Amazon blog for that author, so I hopped on over to the Juno site. I don't see any mention of why the book isn't available.

I don't really care either way--and of the two, I want to read The Crown Conspiracy more (I'm a sucker for a well-done thief tale, while UF with kick-butt heroines has already started to bore me). It just seems more than a coincidence that out of the five books in my order, the two published by small presses are the two that I have to wait on. It reminds me a little of something Terry Pratchett said at a booksigning I attended in 2006. His first book was published by a small press and was a huge bestseller--and it almost bankrupted the publisher, which wasn't set up to handle large orders. Good luck to Aspirations Media!

Read me at BCS!

My story "Sand-Skin Man" is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! I'm very proud. And it's a great way to start off the new year, with a story in an excellent magazine!

Oh, and Terry Pratchett has been knighted, which is awesome too. Although not quite as awesome as my story--but then, what is?

Oh, and an idea from P.J. Hoover via Carrie Harris, I'm also going to try and read 50 books this year (not re-reads). I'll stick a new gumpy thing on the sidebar to list the books as I read them, so if anyone wants to race you can see how I'm doing. Competitive reading = fun!

Donate for Terry Pratchett

Boing Boing contains all that is good and true in the internets, or at least much that is interesting. This morning I found a link to the Zombie Apocalypse blog (why does everyone else have such cool blog titles and mine sucks? Hmm, I think that's my fault), which is encouraging everyone to donate to Alzheimer's research in order to match a donation Pratchett made himself.

Go here to donate. I just did--just 1 pound (why does my keyboard not have the pound sign?)--which is about $2. Even I can afford that, and I'm out of a job right now.

I'm wondering when the funny fantasy anthologies are going to start coming out in honor of Pratchett, with proceeds going to Alzheimer's research. I want to buy them.

Odds and Ends

I just read this on Boing Boing--Terry Pratchett has revealed that he's been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. This is horrible news. It would be horrible enough if it was news about anyone I cared about, but it's doubly horrible that it's a brilliant writer who should be writing books for decades to come. At least Beethoven could still compose after he went deaf.

But since Pratchett has asked people to keep things cheerful and not get all doom-and-gloom on his ass, I will quickly switch topics. It looks like I'll be driving down to Tennessee Friday, not Saturday as planned, because of a snowstorm that's supposed to sweep across the region on Saturday. One of the reasons I'm moving is so I can avoid driving in snow. And this has another happy result: I don't have to work Friday. Of course, I do have to drive nine+ hours with a dog and two unhappy cats, two of which animals have kidney problems that require them to have access to water at all times and access to emptying bladders at frequent intervals. I should point out that the dog is a Newfoundland and the car is a Yaris hatchback. Oh yes, and I have one box that absolutely must be stuffed into the (wee) hatchback, along with clothes, computer, TV, pretty much everything from the kitchen, and linens. And the other box, that I was going to leave with my brother since it was only yet more books--well, I opened it last night to get something to read, and discovered to my horror that it wasn't just all books, it was mostly stuff from the bedroom that I have to bring with me. God knows how I'll manage to cram it in the car.

Wait, this is not cheering me up. Today I discovered Elizabeth bear's blog, They Must Need Bears, and reading back entries has brought me joy and staved off boredom for hours. And I'm wishing my last name was something cool like Bear, only not Bear because that's Elizabeth Bear's name. My talk of names probably alarms my family at this point, since I have a long history of changing mine. But don't worry, I still like Shaw. It's bright emerald green.

Rats. Also, Terry Pratchett spins!

Well, I got a rejection from the editor who requested the full ms. a few weeks ago. On the other hand, she gave me a good critique and said many very nice things about the manuscript. So I'm disappointed, but also hopeful.

Yesterday I drove five hours to see Terry Pratchett. He gave a great talk--interesting and funny--and had an extended question-and-answer session afterwards. If you ever get the chance to see him (and you should try), he seems a little tired of answering questions about how he writes.

One of the questions he answered was why Tiffany Aching's family raises sheep but no one seems to spin. During the course of answering the question, he mentioned that he spins and has two spinning wheels. Wow! Hey, I spin too! That's too awesome for words. One of my favorite authors shares one of my favorite hobbies as well.

He said he has a fourth Tiffany Aching book planned but that after that the character will probably be too old for the children's Discworld books; he also said that he doesn't have any plans to include her in the other Discworld books. He also said he's planning a third book with Moist von Lipwig. Someone asked him if Vetinari is possibly grooming Moist as a successor, but Pratchett said no, that "Moist can be the shepherd, but he can't be the butcher." And that seemed to be an off the cuff remark, not something he'd worked up ahead of time. Currently he's working on a non-Discworld book about some people on an island, but he didn't say much about it.

He talked a lot about the filming of the Hogfather and other of his books that had been/were being filmed. He mentioned that Sean Astin plays Twoflower and does a great job, and also said that Astin is himself a Discworld fan. Apparently Pratchett was doing a signing in London or someplace and Astin showed up in line, at which point Pratchett said, "Hey, I know you--you were in Harry Potter!" That got a good laugh.

There were about 200 people who wanted books signed. Considering that Pratchett had a cold and was losing his voice, he was remarkably good about talking to people. I tried to think of something non-fangirlish but witty to say to him, but by the time I got my books signed (some three hours after he started his talk), he was really flagging so I didn't really say anything at all. At that point he seemed to be at the wretched point of a cold where you no longer care where you put the used kleenexes, so he was surrounded by crumpled pink tissues, like flowers. Poor guy. He seems really nice and obviously likes his fans. I think today was his last stop on his book tour and he gets to go home, so I hope he gets better soon.

I'm currently reading (carefully) a copy of Making Money that has the author's fingerprints on it. And probably also his cold germs.